We introduced Upgraded URLs in February to help you manage your landing page and tracking information separately, using the new final URL and tracking template fields. This new URL structure lets you track more insights into your ad performance, scale tracking updates across your account, and keep your ads running while making updates to your shared tracking templates.

As a reminder, all advertisers will need to use Upgraded URLs in place of destination URLs starting on July 1, 2015. If you do not use tracking parameters in your destination URLs or only use auto-tagging, you can wait for the auto-upgrade starting on July 1st.¹

Today, we’d like to share tips to help you take advantage of the benefits of Upgraded URLs, and stories from advertisers who are succeeding with the new and improved URL system.

Tips for upgrading your URLs

1. To track audience, location and mobile performance, add the new ValueTrack parameters to your tracking templates using the advanced upgrade.²
2. Keep your ads running even while you make important edits to your tracking using the new shared tracking templates. For example, if you launch a new promotion, add your new tracking parameters to your campaign level tracking template - saving you time and avoid losing potential new business.
3. If you make frequent tracking updates across your account, use the advanced upgrade and shared tracking templates. This lets you make tracking updates in one place and apply them to your entire account, campaign or ad groups.

To learn more about the benefits of Upgraded URLs, check out this video.

Early success

From time savings to reliable and scalable tracking management - here are some of the success stories we’ve heard from advertisers who are using Upgraded URLs.

"Our clients like to move fast, which means a lot of changes to landing pages and tracking that we need to append onto our URLs. Upgraded URLs let us be nimble with these changes, without the risk of losing our ad history or triggering a review. The new value track parameters let us see deeper insights into our business, and we can set them at the account level for easier implementation. I absolutely recommend upgrading to any advertiser." — Sean McEntee, Account Lead at 3Q Digital

"Upgraded URLs let us set different final URLs for mobile and desktop under the umbrella of a single ad. This gives our teams and our advertisers’ businesses a more reliable way to update tracking and helps ensure customers land on the appropriate page, rather than relying on URL redirects." — David Gong, Director of Strategic Accounts at PMG

Upgrade today

If you haven’t updated your URLs yet, check out our blog or the upgrade guide to learn how you can upgrade them today. As always, please contact us at any time for help with the upgrade.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, Google AdWords

URL management just got easier 

Constant connectivity has increased the ways that people engage with your business, meaning more data and metrics for you to use to manage ad performance.  That’s why we are introducing Upgraded URLs to provide an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads*.

Upgraded URLs offer several benefits for advertisers, including:

• less time spent managing URL tracking updates
• reduced crawl and load times on your website
• new ValueTrack parameters that help you gain additional insights about your ads. Learn more.

Johannes Lipka, Product & Solution Manager at eProfessional GmbH, says: “Upgraded URLs have been one of the most time-saving tools we’ve used in AdWords. It’s allowed us to change custom tracking parameters for a group of URLs all in one place, without re-setting ad stats. We plan to upgrade our clients’ accounts over to Upgraded URLs as soon as possible.”

Destination URLs today

If you use URL tracking today, you’ll notice that Destination URLs are made up of two components:

1. Landing page URL This is the URL that customers see in their browsers when they get to your landing page after clicking on your ad.
2. Tracking This section includes information like redirects to third party tracking services, ValueTrack parameters, or custom creative IDs.

In the example below, blue represents the landing page, and green represents the tracking information.


With destination URLs, anytime you need to adjust tracking, you have to update the entire destination URL. This triggers a re-review of your entire destination URL and your ads stop running while your URL is re-reviewed -- causing you to lose time and potential new business.

What’s changing with Upgraded URLs

Upgraded URLs let you enter the landing page portion of your URL and your tracking information separately in AdWords. Now you have the option to update your tracking information at your account, campaign or ad group without having to re-set your ad stats.

Let’s see how the example URL above could be constructed using the new upgraded URL fields.

Final URL is where you’ll enter your website’s landing page URL.

The landing page 'www.example.com' is now entered in the Final URL Field

Tracking templates are where you enter your tracking information and tell AdWords how to assemble your URLs. Now, if you’d like to scale your tracking updates across multiple URLs, you can use a shared tracking template at the account, campaign or ad group level. If you’d prefer to manage your URL tracking information at the individual URL level, you can use a tracking template at the ad, keyword, or sitelink level.

In the example below, we’ve used a tracking template at the account level to apply our tracking information across all of the URLs in the account.

Tracking information for all URLs in the account is placed in the account level tracking template

Custom parameters let you customize the information you’d like to monitor as well as the specific values that get inserted into your URLs when your ad clicks are triggered. For example, if you’d like to insert the value 12345 whenever this specific ad is clicked, you can set the custom parameter {_mycreative} in this ad.

Enter '_mycreative' in the custom parameter field to insert 12345 whenever that ad is clicked

New URLs, new insights

As part of this upgrade, you’ll gain access to many new insights about your ad clicks.

New ValueTrack parameters let you track additional insights about your business. For example, if you’d like to track how many ad clicks were triggered for your creative by location, you can use the new {loc_physical_ms} ValueTrack parameter. To optimally use the new ValueTrack parameters, you can set them up at the account level so you can track these values across all the URLs in your account. Learn about the new value track parameters.

The valuetrack for location {location_physical_ms} is in green in the account level tracking template

Next steps

We’ll be rolling out Upgraded URLs to all advertisers starting this week. We encourage all advertisers who use tracking in their URLs to upgrade to the new system by July 1, 2015. Starting on that date, your URLs will begin updating to the new structure.

If you're using a tracking platform to manage your URLs, we encourage working with them to manage these changes.

To learn how you can start using Upgraded URLs for your new ad URLs, please see our article on Help Center.

Want to stay on top of more AdWords Best Practices?  Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, Google AdWords

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*Everywhere we say ads, we also mean other targeting options available for the Search Network, Display Network, and Shopping.

Understanding the true impact of advertising

Advertisers have a fundamental need to understand the effectiveness of their advertising. Unfortunately, determining the true impact of advertising on consumer behavior is deceptively difficult. This difficulty in measurement is especially applicable to advertising on non-brand (i.e. generic) search terms, where ROI may be driven indirectly over multiple interactions that include downstream brand search activities. Advertising effectiveness is often estimated using standard tracking processes that rely upon ‘Last Click’ attribution. However, ‘Last Click’ based tracking can significantly underestimate the true value of non-brand search advertising. This fact was recently demonstrated by lastminute.com, a leading travel brand, using a randomized experiment - the most rigorous method of measurement.




Experimental Approach

lastminute.com recently conducted an online geo-experiment to measure the effectiveness of their non-brand search advertising on Google AdWords.  The study included offline and online conversions.  The analysis used a mathematical model to account for seasonality and city-level differences in sales.  Cities were randomly assigned to either a test or a control group. The test group received non-brand search advertising during the 12 week test period, while the control group did not receive such advertising during the same period. The benefit of this approach is that it allows statements to be made regarding the causal relationship between non-brand search advertising and the volume of conversions - the real impact of the marketing spend.

Full lastminute.com case study

Findings

The results of the experiment indicate that the overall effectiveness of the non-brand search advertising is 43% greater¹  than the estimate generated by lastminute.com’s standard online tracking system.

The true impact of the non-brand search advertising is significantly larger than the ‘Last Click’ estimate because it accounts for

1. upper funnel changes in user behavior that are not visible to a ‘Last Click’ tracking system, and
2. the impact of non-brand search on sales from online and offline channels.

This improved understanding of the true value of non-brand search advertising has given lastminute.com the opportunity to revise their marketing strategy and make better budgeting decisions.




How can you benefit?

As proven by this study, ‘Last Click’ measurement can significantly understate the true effectiveness of search advertising. Advertisers should look to assess the performance of non-brand terms using additional metrics beyond ‘Last Click’ conversions. For example, advertisers should review the new first click conversions and assist metrics available in AdWords and Google Analytics. Ideally, advertisers will design and carry out experiments of their own to understand how non-brand search works to drive sales.

Read more on AdWords Search Funnels
Read more on Google Analytics Multi Channel Funnels

Anish Acharya, Industry Analyst, Google; Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google; Gabriel Hughes, Head of Attribution, Google; and Jon Vaver, Senior Quantitative Analyst, Google contributed to this report.

¹ This result has a 95% Bayesian confidence interval of [1.17, 1.66].

Posted by Jeremy Tully, Inside AdWords Crew

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”